


Apocalyptic Raids

by Agonist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dave Lalonde - Freeform, Homestuck Kidswap, Other, Rose Strider - Freeform, bro is the same guy.
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:20:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23919622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Agonist/pseuds/Agonist
Summary: Your name is ROSE STRIDER. You have just killed your BRO, like you always knew you would. You are now the sole proprietor of an apartment at the end of the world. What will you do?
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	Apocalyptic Raids

**Author's Note:**

> A kidswap AU picking up right where [Misery, Company](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23814031) (which I wrote) ended. Highly recommend reading that before diving in here, as this will elaborate on the same themes and plotline.

You decide there will be no burial. If your Bro had wanted obsequies, he would’ve drilled their details into you until you proved capable of dictating them in your sleep. He didn’t, so he must be content with his carcass becoming Imp food or plaything. Not that a dead man’s dictums are worth considering. All one’s authority, all the years anyone can spend cultivating honor and dignity, expire along with their heartbeat. This you have known since you were very young: that all the folds of your psyche are a slave to the meat-thing. The mind can be shattered over and over, the meat-thing but once. Your Bro can desire no longer, so you turn your attention elsewhere, to the meteoric heat that has long dried your tears. It rises in the apocalyptic arrhythmia of the comet shower engulfing the city, a reverse rain of fire and death. It will soon become unbearable. That is absolutely the foremost reason for you to rise up off your feet, off the rooftop and into your apartment. Singular your. Winner, meet spoils.

You expect to find Dave on the single-seating couch in the living room, notepad in hand and wearing a second, clear pair of spectacles, and then be asked to lay down and “start at the beginning.” Cartoonish? Yes, thus exactly the sort of behavior he is prone to when putting on airs. Instead, you catch him in the kitchen, in the act of fixing himself a sandwich with your meager pantry’s materials. He wields a butter knife crusty with ancient peanut butter in one hand, a jar of mayonnaise in the other. Atop the counter there is bread, has-been tomatoes, more mold than cheese, and an iceberg lettuce predating the Anthropocene. He gives you a look of, despite the indoor shades, transparent mortification.

DAVE: oh hi rose 

DAVE: sorry i raided your pantry i just had a wicked hour of vinyasa scheduled this sunrise 

DAVE: and then there was 

DAVE: phew 

DAVE: all the imp killing and bad ass rooftop jumping and badder asser cross country flying 

DAVE: my mind was telling me no but my body 

DAVE: my body was telling me rotten gouda and salami on rye 

DAVE: speaking of you wouldnt happen to have any ham lying around that i might salvage with my stomach before it teeters off the precarious cliff of almost spoiled and into the torture pits of very spoiled 

Dave would never fix himself anything with such deplorable implements. You’ve seen the breakfast teas and vegan omelettes perfectly plated on ceramic matching the deck floor’s color he posts on social media. Naturally, he ought to be giving all your silverware a neurotic scrub-through. But he’s not being natural. He’s trying to ease you into trifling conversation. Funny - if you’d found him trying to do the dishes and failing to protect his brand-new suit in the absence of an apron, you might’ve actually cared to rib him. 

ROSE: I’ll do you one better.

You approach the fridge and rifle within for fresh ham, protein being the only nutrient consistently restocked in this household. His nervous eyes fix the back of your neck the entire time. Enshrined by a necropolis of half-empty energy drinks stacked to resemble, precariously, a Shaolin temple (or so you thought when you were ten), awaits the pork leg you were looking for. You liberate it and place it on the counter with a mighty thud.

DAVE: i thought those only existed in cartoons

DAVE: aw shit its got the bone in and everything rose you shouldnt have

He’s leaning against the counter next to you, so close. You’re not used to sharing the kitchen. Not voluntarily, at least, and not without being attacked at a moment’s notice. You call up your 2xknifekind specibus - here is some comfort - and produce one of your older, shittier blades, in lieu of the dozen knives lying about the sink housing advanced microorganism civilizations. Dave balks. Almost imperceptibly, but you don’t see it as much as feel it, the measures between his body and yours shifting as his limbic system reacts to danger. Not defensively, no fingers twitching towards his specibus as they ought to. Just a useless shying away. He’s full of openings. To think you had him pegged for the second best fighter in the session; your fault, of course, for overestimating the training imparted upon your teammates by their respective tutors. Are you ever glad your Bro taught you to fight, anywhere, anytime.

He doesn’t think you’ll start assaulting him unwarranted, of course. There is a gap between how one likes to perceive others and who primitive prey instinct regardless categorizes as predator. You know which you’d rather be. You’re the one slicing the ham.

ROSE: Don’t worry. This isn’t the one I decollated my brother with.

For that, you’d saved your best knife. This unresponsive imitation you’re holding is taking epochs to saw through the inert leg. It’s never been sharpened, and you don’t think it was meant to. Its blunted edge is the closest thing to a training blade you were allowed to wield after turning eleven.

DAVE: knife looks kinda shitty

ROSE: All the others are dirty. If it would behoove you to clean them, be my literal guest.

DAVE: i dunno sis there is an awful lot of them and you know me

DAVE: once i get started with something i just cant let go of it

DAVE: even if i should really be dealing with and this is just an example a global cataclysm of my own making thats about to pulverize my home planet into a fine ass mist

ROSE: And hypothetically speaking, if such a situation were underway, what would be keeping you from prioritizing this clearly more urgent responsibility?

DAVE: hey hardball psychotherapy is my bit

ROSE: Your approach can be more accurately described as skittish.

DAVE: yeowch have mercy on me

The ham appears to be getting tougher as you approach the center. You redouble your efforts.

DAVE: maybe i would be worried silly about a friend who needs the most help when she says she wants it the least

DAVE: and if that friend was the kind that needed cold logic i would tell her its because my life kinda depends on her

DAVE: but if i spoke from the heart

DAVE: which if youve studied psychotherapy you know is all kinds of impossible

ROSE: Serviceably, this is a speculative scenario. So feel free to spill your imagined double’s guts. 

The scraping din coming from the ham stops on par with your knife jamming in its dead center. You stop to stretch your wrists before resuming a two-handed effort. If that doesn’t work, the next step is levering your foot against the counter.

DAVE: rose im pretty sure you hit the bone

ROSE: Didn’t stop me earlier.

DAVE: ok well i planned on dancing around it some more but youre not one for subtlety

ROSE: I didn’t say I would talk about it.

DAVE: what is it you dont want to talk about

ROSE: The fact that I just killed my Bro. Should such an admission come covered in snot and tears? Did you expect it to prove difficult, as if exhuming it would be the fruit of your backbreaking labor?

DAVE: no im not trying to crack you open

DAVE: not everyone who tries to help you is your opponent

The bone snaps. Your knife stays lodged there, halfway into the marrow. You rip the rest of the ham “slice” out and drop the resulting uneven chunk atop Dave’s ersatz meal. 

ROSE: Accusations of pugnacity. Not your most cutting observation.

DAVE: cuz im not trying to get a leg up on you

DAVE: see what i mean

ROSE: Well, haven’t you got all my mechanisms figured out. We’re similar like that.

DAVE: intense and straightforward

ROSE: Hah.

ROSE: Viewing other people as machines.

DAVE: i dont

ROSE: Come now. What is it you’re doing, if not trying to input the code that will get me to display the correct emotional response to fratricide?

ROSE: You only happen to believe you’re invulnerable, so flawlessly in control of your inner workings. Since others can’t hurt you, you can afford to fancy yourself a fixer. An easy belief to hold unchallenged if you specialize in the realm of words.

ROSE: I am under no illusions regarding my vincibility. The doer stays alive, the done-to doesn’t.

ROSE: Now that you have your ham sandwich, I would like to turn your attention to the cannonade of meteors guaranteed to flatten us if we don’t do something about it. There is proof positive of my status as doer lying dead on the rooftop, and I intend to maintain said status. You can join me by performing your duties as server player, and that is the last time I will ever require your fucking help.

You don’t realize you’ve balled your fists until you’re done unleashing your litany upon Dave. At some unnoticed point in time, you shrunk the space between the both of you into a smidgen. This close, you can almost see behind his shades, but you don’t need to to read his body language: he barely seems taller than you with the way he’s sinking into the floor. He’s on the retreat.

DAVE: alright you win

ROSE: So it was a fight.

DAVE: jesus entire shitting christ rose you made it one

ROSE: I’m going to go pick up my laptop. You can sit wherever, there’s flat soda in the fridge. 

With that, you’re on your heels with your chin held high and headed to your room. You latch the door slowly, quietly so Dave doesn’t hear the implicit call for privacy. You slump against it, its wood lukewarm in the midday summer heat, and you try to cry.

Really, you do. It seems that this is a thing you do now, and you might as well get the whole embarrassing display over with before you must press on to the task ahead. But you can’t. You feel choked from within, the same gnarled hand gripping your throat and your tear ducts and your... whatever it was that flowed from you earlier so easily, so involuntarily, when all you wanted to do was stuff it back into yourself in shame. You can’t will yourself to go grab your laptop. You can’t even wander around your bed and become half-lost in one of the myriad activities you often engage in when you have to do something but don’t terribly want to, like greeting your wooden dummy with a couple of friendly elbows, or seeding illicit torrents for gore-drenched and forgettable Southeast Asian action films, or rifling through your collection of trading cards and ideating optimal strategies to defeat rivals forever unfaced. You just slide to the floor and lay there, inactive, wanting so badly to happen, helpless to do anything other than wait to be happened to. It’s more humiliating than crying could ever be.

The buzzing in your pocket makes a decision for you. You whip your phone out, expecting a message from Dave. What greets you instead makes your eyebrows and your heart rate shoot up in unison.

\- - future!teleologicalTrumpeter [FTT] started pestering teleologicalTrumpeter [TT]- -

FTT: You’ve named the training dummy in your room “Jaspers” and think of it as something of a pet. You’re 83 pages into writing an action drama screenplay about a vengeful young woman ripping Dallas’ criminal underground apart with her bare fists, tentatively titled “The Imbrued Blade Of Rex Talionis”. You’re sitting in your room right now, simpering at the darkness, because you didn’t bother turning the lights on.

FTT: I am you from the future. Stop moping and go decapitate Dave Lalonde right this instant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [THE WORLD WILL DIE ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF_bvpy0ySo)   
>  [UNDER THE SWORD OF DESTINY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF_bvpy0ySo)


End file.
